96 years of cooperative university teaching in Rumania

The name chosen by the ARTIFEX university in Rumania, which represents a response to the real social need for training for professional and managerial staff, managers and specialists who are required to both manage and organise the economic and social sector of craft and production cooperation, serves to uphold the tradition and continuity of craft and production cooperation. Indeed, in Latin ARTIFEX means skilled craftsman. The ARTIFEX university, which is a higher education institute founded by the Rumanian National Union of Craft and Production Cooperation (UCECOM) is continuing a tradition which is 96 years old and which started and established in law in 1919.

A broad training programme is made available to the more than the 1,400 university undergraduates (5 programmes) and students studying for a masters degree (8 programmes). The majority of the more than 12,000 students who have successfully completed their studies at the university to date currently work in cooperative organisations or in the country’s other small and medium-sized enterprises.

The university’s activities have always been geared towards the creation of partnerships with other higher education and research institutions such as the Cooperative College of Manchester (United Kingdom), the Collège Coopératif d’Aix en Provence - Provence Alpes Méditerranée (France), the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA) in Venezuela, Vilnius Cooperative College (Lithuania), the Ecole de l’Entrepreneuriat Social (EEES) in Montpellier (France) and the Polytechnic University of Czestochowa.

This article is a brief summary of several articles which have appeared in the “Gazeta Viața Cooperației Meșteșugărești” Journal, which is published twice a month by UCECOM.